In one of the sordid tenements wedged into a narrow space as yet unclaimed by business this mother had found a shelter for her brood. Four rooms “through” with a cupboard were rented to her for $9.00 a month and her services as janitress, which were reckoned as worth $3.00. Thus, while her flat would otherwise have cost $12 a month and have absorbed exactly one week of her husband’s wages, she saved $3.00 out of the rent to spend on food for her family of six. This was the important fact which had kept them on Eleventh Avenue from year to year, though the mother always hoped that each winter would be her last in the house.
But not all families have the fortitude, the endurance, the power of ceaseless, undiminished effort which this particular group possessed. Even with those who accept the challenge and make the continual effort to keep their heads above water, strength and courage sometimes break. The loss of two days’ work for a daughter whose full week’s wage amounts to only $4.00 or $5.00 may mean a family tragedy. What elsewhere are incidents, are hazards here.
We have fallen into the habit of looking to the mother as the mainstay of the family. She is held to a rigorous standard which neither husband nor children are required to measure up to. We expect her to counteract the difficulties and evil influences of her environment by possessing all the known virtues of character. As a matter of fact, the worry and strain of insecurity become too great for many a woman. She grows apathetic, careless, and stolid, or she becomes querulous and neurotic. Perhaps she takes to drink. Drinking is rife on the West Side; it is the easy and familiar escape from worry and discouragement. For the woman who drinks there is scant sympathy or toleration. The decent, hardworking mother has no patience with her. If the victim is putting up any fight at all it is a desperate and a solitary one, for she can expect no help from others. With every lapse, every slipping back from the precarious foothold gained so painfully, she is met by scorn and reproach from her judges with whom the long weeks of effort do not count when once she has failed. To rise many times from the utmost depths of despair and bitterness is not given to human nature, and she ends as an outcast.
I am thinking of one black, terrible half hour with a woman of my acquaintance. A thunder storm darkened all the outer world and almost no light entered the kitchen where we sat. It was one of the two small rear-house rooms that she rented for $8.50 a month. This day it was stifling and unswept, cluttered with little piles of her rubbish. She was going to move; she had been dispossessed. She had lost her job, a position held for three months after a winter when she had hunted work for weeks. For seven years she had kept up a home for her girl and boy, one year during the illness of her husband who drank and beat her, and six years after his death. She had looked forward to the time when Sadie should get her working papers; but the girl was incompetent and irresponsible and failed to keep any job for long.
This year had brought the mother her first out-of-work experience. In the course of it she had slipped far behind. But with every seven dollars’ pay during the past three months she had climbed slowly back. The rent was even. The insurance agent lacked a single dollar. Every night on coming home she had figured slowly and clumsily with the aid of her boy “Petie.” She had “built castles, which no one had ought to do.” Castles! Dreams of a new suit for herself and Sadie, of whole shoes for Petie which should not be begged from his school; dreams in the future of an “all-through” apartment, even with rugs, and curtains of cheap lace. But again thrown out of work, hope was gone.
She was a woman slow and clumsy of movement, who went through her plodding days quietly and dumbly, with a certain trembling hesitance. But her rusty black clothes were always neat. The housekeeper said, “You c’d tell she was respectable.” It was a cherished respectability. She suffered bitter pangs when she saw it fall away. Today her tongue was loosened by drink. She talked quickly, with an unaccustomed rise and fall of speech, and with fluency of gesture. She clung to Petie, possessed with the idea that some one was trying to take him away. “They shall not take me boy. The girl is wild; she has me heart broke. I’ve worked and I’ve tried an’ it’s all come to this. But I won’t be parted fr’m me boy.” And again and again, the voice rising to a cry, “I’ve been turned down—turned down I am. I’m not a young woman now an’ you know I can’t stand it—turned down hard I’ve been.”
Without doubt some women of the dependent classes are strongly braced in their morals by the rigorous standard to which we hold them. The consciousness that nothing but the best of conduct will be excused in them must serve as a constant stimulus to heroic living. But on the other hand, there are doubtless many who have drifted to the bottom as the result of a first lapse which might have been excused and survived under a less rigorous standard. There are too many who share the decent working woman’s point of view. “When a woman takes to the can, she ain’t got no good left.”
Many of our girls came from homes where the parents were heavy and constant drinkers.[77] They were familiar with the appearance of drunkenness. It does not revolt such girls when it breaks out in a place of amusement. They do not resent it in their boy companions but view it on the whole with unconcern. But they come to be wary of its manifestations in others and even unconsciously expert in inebriate psychology. There was one family where the alcoholic father was always turned over to the fourteen-year-old daughter during his “sprees” to be managed. When he was in this condition she was “the only one who could do anything with him.” Surely an ominous ability for a fourteen-year-old daughter!
In a neighborhood like the Middle West Side, poverty is seldom found isolated from its menacing concomitants—ignorance, immorality, drinking, filth, and degradation. Whether as cause or result, these appear as close companions of want. Some of our girls came from families which hovered constantly on the verge of disruption. The arrogant, decisive power of the law always hung over them like the sword of Damocles, threatening dismemberment.
Here was Annie Brink, who came to her club with Hyde and Jekyll moods. Sometimes she was gentle and tractable. Sometimes she looked out sullenly from a cloud of morbid depression and gloom impossible to pierce. She had grown up in a world of sudden disasters. Almost from babyhood she had been a household drudge. There were seven children in the family and Annie, the eldest daughter, was early pressed into service as general houseworker and nurse for the younger ones. To take proper care of seven young children is too big a job for one woman, and Annie’s mother was certainly much too gay and irresponsible by disposition to attempt it. “There was seven of us kids,” said Annie, “so I had to help. I wasn’t let out on the street much when I was little. One house where we were had a back yard and we’d play there. But then we moved. When we went on to Tenth Avenue there was a fire escape. We’d take pillows out there and sit. It was just grand. Then I always could play on the organ. It was mamma’s since she married, but she don’t use it any more. It’s the same as mine now. It stays locked, because if all seven of us used it there wouldn’t be any organ soon.”